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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Will cash cutbacks spell the end for Freedom?

By
HELEN GAVAGHAN in
WASHINGTON DC

To the irritation of America’s partners in the space station Freedom,
the White House last week ordered yet another redesign of the station. The
risk now is that NASA will scale the station back so far that Congress will
decide it is of no value and cancel the programme.

The space station has survived several determined efforts to kill it.
Until about a month ago, many experts believed that the project was safe
at last. ‘I would have said that the space station was a done deal,’ says
John Pike from the Federation of American Scientists. Now it faces its most
radical redesign to date.

The redesign, due to be completed on 1 June, comes at a particularly
bad time for the European Space Agency. ESA was poised to award contracts
this month for building Europe’s contribution to the station, having reached
agreement with industry after months of bitter bargaining. Now those contracts
are on hold. ‘This delays us at least six months, depending on what the
final configuration will be,’ said an official at ESA.

In Washington, there is confusion about the redesign. A memo from Dan
Goldin, NASA’s administrator, to directors of the agency’s field stations
is contradictory. It says that the redesigned space station need not necessarily
have a permanent crew. Yet later in the same document, Goldin, says that
one of the project’s goals is to bring forward the date when the space station
can be permanently crewed.

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This difference is important to ESA. The intergovernmental agreement
it signed with the US, and which ministers from member states support, is
for a permanently manned civilian space station. ‘If the IGA is not honoured,
we would have to review the decision at the ministerial level,’ says Ian
Pryke, head of ESA’s Washington office. It was only in November that ministers
finally agreed to fund Columbus, the laboratory to be attached to the space
station.

The White House has asked for the operating costs of the space station
to be halved, but no one knows what those costs are likely to be and it
is not clear how much the White House wants to spend.

NASA predicts that developing the space station will cost a total of
$17 billion, of which $8.5 billion has already been spent. That total will
be now have to be reduced, but the size of the cuts will not be known until
President Clinton presents the budget for 1994 to Congress on 5 April.

Derek Deil, ESA’s senior space station engineer in the US, says that
ESA would like the redesigned station to be based on the current design.
He may not have his wish. Pike believes that NASA may choose an orbiting
laboratory more like Russia’s Mir station, and that it will not have a permanent
crew.

Pike sees this as a critical point in American space history. Unless
the space station is a strong programme, both it and the space shuttle will
be increasingly vulnerable to funding cuts, he believes. Eventually, he
suggests, NASA’s other missions, such as Earth observation and aeronautics
could be parcelled out to other agencies, and ‘the last one out, please
turn out the lights’.

Goldin’s view is different. He told the Goddard memorial symposium last
week that NASA must do its part to reduce the country’s budget deficit.
The agency can either redesign the space station or ‘have no space station’.

In future, said Goldin, NASA will significantly increase the amount
it spends on aeronautical research, though space will still be its main
business. This position is in line with President Clinton’s technology policy.
Clinton called for increased research on supersonic flight, noise reduction,
weather prediction, and navigation and control systems.